The University of the Philippines (UP) makes it to the top 100 universities in the world in the area of development studies. It is one of only four ASEAN universities which were included in that list.
UP also ranks highly in seven other subjects, thereby making it an elite institution according to the 2015 QS Quacquarelli Symonds World University Rankings by Subject.
More than 3,000 universities were evaluated from which only 894 representatives from 60 countries were eventually ranked.
“To be elite means a lot,” says Vice President for Academic Affairs Gisela Concepcion. “[In a span of one year], we moved from one elite subject to eight, and several are close to elite.”
Released on April 29, the rankings show English language and literature as UP’s second strongest subject for which it places between 101st and 150th in the world.
The University is likewise in the top 200 for modern languages, agriculture and forestry, communication and media studies, politics and international studies, and sociology, while it is in the top 300 for medicine.
Last year, UP made it to the rankings solely in agriculture and forestry.
[VIEW: 2015 World University Rankings by Subject]
The QS World University Rankings by Subject considers the universities’ academic and employer reputation based on global surveys, as well as their research impact (i.e., the faculty’s citations per paper as recorded in Elsevier’s Scopus database).
The methodology for the rankings covers only those indicators that “bypass the direct involvement of institutions and can reliably be stratified by subject discipline.” It also uses a variable approach to weighting the different subjects taking into account the disciplines’ differences in publication and citation rates, popularity among employers, and size.
US universities yet again figure prominently in the this year’s rankings, with almost 37 percent of top 50 places going to them. UK’s University of Cambridge is in the top 10 for 31 disciplines and the National University of Singapore is in the top 10 for 11 subjects.
The World University Rankings have been in existence since 2004 but in 2011, they were expanded to encompass more popular individual subjects. QS collects global and regional rankings to guide prospective students in identifying notable schools in their chosen field of study.
